Cultural Conceptualisations in West African English

This book is an application of the cognitive-linguistic framework to the study of the New Englishes, specifically West African English. Its theoretical part provides an outline of the analytical tools, in particular conceptual metaphor/metonymy and cultural-model theory. Using corpus-linguistic methods and incorporating research from neighbouring social sciences, the empirical part explores culture-specific conceptualisations and their linguistic expression in the variety under analysis. The findings attest to the «cultural contextualisation» of the English language in the West African setting. The last part of the book critically discusses the current debate on the role and spread of English as a global language, from a cognitive-linguistic and discourse-analytical perspective.

Autorentext

The Author: Frank Polzenhagen taught linguistics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and at The University of Hong Kong. He is a member of an international research project on West African English, which is in progress at these two universities.

Inhalt

Contents : Theories of metaphor - Conceptual-metaphor theory - Metaphor and discourse - Cultural-model theory - West African English - The African community model - Kinship - Conceptualisations of community, leadership, politics, witchcraft, corruption - 'Cultural contextualisation' - Comparative corpus analysis - Cultural keywords - Frequency analysis - Collocational patterns - The debate on global English - Cultural models of globalisation.